CH041
enfer boréal | eldorado
cd-r
Creepy ambient electronics by this relatively new project helmed by Frenchman Maxime Primault. A total trip that lingers somewhere between soothing meditation and psychedelic nightmare. Waves of drone that wrap around your head like a thick blanket while the psychedelic undertones take you to a place where those ugly ass nightmares are born.
40 copies, in slimline dvd cases with art by Nazi Knife Jonas. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++It starts with gentle waves that evoke desolate tundra, empty landscapes of snow and sky where these long, howling arcs of drone are the gales that sweeps this imagined world then retreating to a low, constant horn-like hum.

This is the opening track "Blue Bared Star" on Enfer Boreal, aka Maxime Primault, latest offering "El Dorado." L'espace Des Éternités Possibles established his credentials as a sonic adventurer of some note. On "El Dorado", the Rennes native makes sonic sculptures that hold rewards both in their intricate details and in their sweeping vista.

"Broken Bones" works in this fashion, with intersecting lines of a kind of flickered purr and percussive pops that sound like the crackling of old vinyl and a kind of low synth rumble where every element seems carefully and individually assembled. "Lost and Lost and Lost" is more minimal, expanding and contracting like long, deep breaths.

The record ends with an almost classic crescendo. "Don Lope" has rattling percussion and shaker that fades away to ascending waves of sound that is almost like a symphony of electric fans, light reified into sound and long notes blown on trumpets several miles away all at once. It has the same grand qualities as Stars of the Lids "Be little with me" which ends Gravitational Pull vs the Desire for an Aquatic Life, both tracks that dwell in the constellations above. -- Alex Kakafikas (29 October, 2008/www.foxydigitalis.com/foxyd)
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A 2008 release by Maxime Primault as Enfer Boréal, ‘Eldorado’ offers a fantastically idiosyncratic read of the legend, sketched in abstract ambience with heavy doses of soothing drone. Never stirring much of a tension, these evocative tracks create an alien musique concrète, a desert noir landscape of creaks, groans, and barren gusts. So it goes from “Blue Bored Star” through “Lost and Lost and Lost”, an initial 20 minutes of resigned quiet and despair. Interlude “Broken Bones” is all texture, denying the effect of glitch by a total inclusion of glitchy material, augmented by bobbing patter, snarl, and a motoric flutter – a momentary dry scrabble of grotesque activity like an oasis of crude oil. “Emptiness and Smoke” blows as cool and hushed as the second passage, though now with an urgency like a gathering storm conjured by the most artificial yet of the albums sounds, a distinctly youthful human hum and terse little wahs like psychedelic noodling. With little advertisement, we stumble upon the fifth and final track, “Don Lope”, a burst of White Rainbow ecstasy made with rattles, the layered babbling of pads, and a swelling chorus of shimmering bright drones with razor-like vibrations as their silver linings. Washing over the track, the darker hue of rain storms and insect swarms imposes itself with the original drone, weighing it down and out with the end of the track. This is a unique, if ultimately decomposing piece of storytelling. In slim clamshell with color insert, art by Jonas Delaborde (of Nazi Knife). (animal psi)